Barrow… Once again, we’re taking advantage of a Northern Rail £10 day rover, starting out from Crewe and travelling via Manchester, firstly to Ulverston. I have a package to deliver there, and the station, though currently in a sadly shabby state, is well worth a few photographs – as is the former terminus next door. The two 65-year-old class 20 diesels (we should describe them as English Electric type 1), visually in as-new condition, were an unexpected bonus.
Barrow’s station was severely damaged during WW2. Its replacement is not pretty. We’ll head for the Dock Museum, on the bank of the Walney channel looking across the water to Vickerstown. It’s a 20-minute leg-stretch on this now fine and sunny day. After a light lunch, we can enjoy this very well presented collection. Its site is a former graving dock – and much of the museum is, uniquely, contained within that dock!
We need to get home again, and rather than staying in Barrow for the next through train to Manchester, we’ll catch an earlier train, which only goes as far as Lancaster. We’ll leave it at Kents Bank, and enjoy the two mile walk, close to the shore of Morecambe Bay, to Grange-over-Sands. There’s time to record Grange’s beautiful station photographically, before boarding our Manchester train. At Piccadilly, we’ll have 8 minutes to get to the Northern ‘stopper’ to Crewe. It’s tight (as was our northbound connection there, some hours earlier), but we’re on time – as were all of today’s trains. About an hour later (just before 8pm) we’re back in Crewe for the drive home, after a most enjoyable day out.
Readers who have got this far may wonder why we didn’t take the more direct route between Preston and Crewe. The answer is in the first sentence – our rover is only valid for Northern Rail services. They don’t run services down the WCML to Crewe. Manchester is the only option.
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